


now press rewind

by englishsummerrain



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: First Meetings, M/M, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 09:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15637701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishsummerrain/pseuds/englishsummerrain
Summary: a city in blossom, and for junhui, where this all started





	now press rewind

**Author's Note:**

> this is a tiny prequel to [on memory and the permanence of being](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14801804), though reading it is not required at all for this piece to make sense (probably).

**Picture this -**

 

April 4th. Somewhere in the late 2010s. Seoul city is blooming, and you wear pink. Soft, dusky pink, like peach roses and a strawberry latte left to cool on the shelf of your twelfth floor apartment. You dress like the city because you don’t belong, and you think if you sprout amongst the flowers then no-one will notice you’ve come a long way from home. 

 

A long way is relative. It’s four hours to Shenzhen, physically, but a whole lifetime, mentally. 

 

Junhui sits in an empty coffee shop in the early hours of the morning and everything seems to blur into one, spinning into the depths of his cup like suds down a sink. There’s hours and days and seconds and a million breaths between this moment and when his life starts, again, just like there was between this moment and when he was born. Not that he realises that, not fully, it’s more a half formed thought that flashes before his subconscious, snatched away on the breeze as summer begins to threaten him with puddles on the kerb and birdsong that filters down the subway steps.

 

It’s all relative. It’s all part of a bigger picture. Seoul might be melancholy blues (and pinks and oranges, the sunrise that blushes through cigarette trails of clouds), but Junhui has a paintbrush. The bigger picture can be changed, or covered completely. He can burn this canvas like he burns himself, up in flames to be something new, a eucalyptus forest amongst wildfires, begging for regrowth.

 

Junhui walks the same route every day, from his apartment in the midst of a forest of half grown concrete trees, past graffiti coated concrete walls up the hill to the bus stop, stands where the breeze curls around his bare ankles and twirls his umbrella like a parasol. Raindrops splatter against the clear plastic webbing and he balances a book on his knee, recommended to him by the girl at the bookshop in the airport. It’s light and easy, the kind of novel you choose not as mindfood, but as something guilty and enjoyable, like fast food after a long day. It’s an introduction into Korean for him again, something that isn’t academic articles or talking shit with the construction workers smoking outside his building. Easy, dipping his toes in the shallow end of the pool to test the temperature.

 

(The water is hot, because it’s the tail end of spring and he knows that summer will burn brilliant gold -- tropical rain is not so different whether you’re in Seoul or Shenzhen, after all).

 

And with May comes a change, a new path beneath his shoes, less sunshine and more shop awnings, more graffiti and fliers for concerts that happened four months ago, more cigarette smoke and the smell of day old grease leaking through dumpsters outside the back doors of restaurants.

 

This is how the story begins. 

 

He needs a new book. Something to sit on his lap again, something comfortable he can bury his nose in while the streets pass him by. He picks up a few more trashy novels and chews through them, but it’s not enough, his teeth barely cut, his mind roaring for more. 

 

This is how the story begins, and he’s not even the one who gets to write it.

 

It begins with a cat, of course.

 

A tortoiseshell, black dots speckled across her forehead like stardust, asleep on an overflowing box of books with broken in spines faded from the sunshine. The door of the shop creaks when he pushes it open and the cool air that embraces him is thick with the smell of sunbaked paper and warm fur, his own personal amortentia, momentarily so intoxicating he has to close his eyes and take a breath to clear his mind.

 

“Let me know if you need anything,” comes a voice, somewhere deeper in the shop, between stacks of shelves that reach down several rows.

 

“Can I pat the cat?” Junhui asks, peering across the room to the window he had spied her in.

 

“If you can find her,” comes the reply, wry. Amused. Who comes to a bookstore to pat the cat?

 

“She’s in the window,” Junhui says. He glances at her, her ears folded down against her head where it rests on her white tipped paws.

 

“Better than on the counter.”

 

The voice gains a face, and he’s entirely unsure what to make of him, except that he’s gorgeous and wide-eyed, that he’s Junhui’s age, feet bare against the worn carpet, dressed for comfort instead of style, baggy shirt and slacks. He tosses back his fringe from his face and smiles at Junhui, all teeth, all eyes that seem to shine. Junhui tilts the brim of his straw hat up a little bit more and returns it with gusto, not self-conscious of his teeth, or his gums, or the freckles that spot the corner of his lip. It feels right, somehow, like a drop of honey in milk, spreading across his skin in a warm flush, something golden. 

 

“Does she stay there often?” Junhui asks. 

 

“She’ll sleep anywhere she thinks will get her attention. Or anywhere I don’t want her,” he says with a shake of his head, then a soft pause. “I’m Jeonghan, by the way,” he adds.

 

It’s summer and next door a magpie is singing, flitting through the trees of the park and picking at melted ice cream on the bench. The flowers in the box outside bloom buttercup yellow, petals splattered with rain, and Junhui sits crossed-legged in the shade of the bookshelves with a cat in his lap. There’s little weight in his heart, and he feels like here he might belong, just for the briefest of moments, as his hand tangles in fur and he watches Jeonghan pull a ladder to the shelf nearest to retrieve something out of his reach.

 

He presses play, and takes the first breath of the rest of his life.


End file.
